193: Chapter 193 Global Interception Fails, Black Rain About to Flood Tokyo

The Eden Barrier surrounding Jeanne d'Arc showed cracks for the first time; those originally perfect platinum light patterns began to distort and shatter under the pressure of some invisible force.

Her climbing speed inevitably slowed down.

Fine beads of sweat seeped from her fair forehead, and her breathing grew heavy; crossing each step felt like resisting the collapse of an entire world.

When she stepped onto the nine hundred and ninety-ninth step.

The mist above dispersed.

A figure stood quietly, blocking the middle of the road.

It was not Arjuna.

It was a young girl wearing a rough linen skirt with her hair tied in a simple bun, clutching a pitchfork covered in soil; her face bore a flush from the sun, and her eyes were filled with the most rustic longing for pastoral life.

It was Jeanne d'Arc.

It was that little girl who herded sheep in the countryside of Domrémy before she became a Saint.

A country girl who didn't need to shoulder the survival of the human order, didn't need to face world-destroying demon kings, and only needed to worry about whether it would rain tomorrow.

Phantom Jeanne d'Arc looked at the high-and-mighty Savior before her; there was no hostility in her eyes, only a deep, heart-stinging pity.

“How much longer will you walk?” the country girl's voice was crisp, carrying the breath of the countryside.

Saver Jeanne d'Arc stopped in her tracks, her Divine Eyes trembling slightly.

“Are you really still yourself?” The country girl raised the pitchfork, pointing at Jeanne's Platinum Battle Dress that flowed with divinity. “You killed your own anger, you killed your own fear, you killed everything that allowed you to be called human.”

“You turned yourself into this empty shell called the Savior. If you win, this world is saved, but the Jeanne who would smile because she drank hot soup will never return.”

“Is this the victory you want?”

The questioning voice echoed at the top of the empty bone pillar.

This was the ultimate interrogation, a self-denial of the ego stripped from the deepest depths of Jeanne's soul, catalyzed by Arjuna's absolute malice.

If the preceding Seven Deadly Sins were external trash, then the current phantom was the true heart that Jeanne had buried with her own hands.

Jeanne remained silent for a long time.

The cold wind at high altitude ruffled her blonde hair, and those gray eyeballs were still staring fixedly at her.

“Is it worth it?” Phantom Jeanne d'Arc asked again.

The Saint slowly raised her head.

In those pure golden eyes, there were no ripples; that thing called emotion had already been sacrificed to the Holy Grail by her own hands the moment she transformed into the Saver class.

“It is worth it.”

Jeanne's voice was very soft, yet it carried an unshakable will.

“If someone must become a monster to redeem this land, then Arjuna chose the Demon King, and I chose the Deity; there is no fundamental difference between the two.”

“As for that country girl...”

Jeanne took a step forward; she did not attack.

Just like that, with an almost indifferent frankness, she walked straight toward the phantom.

At the moment the two figures overlapped.

Phantom Jeanne d'Arc let out a final, faint sigh.

Subsequently, the linen skirt, the pitchfork, and the fragrance of the fields all silently dissolved in the platinum holy light.

She walked through her own past.

And killed her final self.

...

At this time, in the sky above Mirror New Delhi, the Eye of the Abyss—which had been hanging in the sky, playfully looking down at the struggles of Li Bai and Newton—turned without warning.

That was not just a physical rotation of the eyeball, but a displacement of the entire high-dimensional malice projection anchor.

The massive pupil did not even fully focus on the two ants struggling desperately before it; its gaze pierced through the turbid atmosphere, crossed thousands of kilometers of geographical barriers, and locked tightly onto the distant East.

That was Mirror Tokyo Bay.

There floated the thing it craved most—the true holy grail transferred by Saver Jeanne d'Arc.

“Buzz—”

A tooth-aching low-frequency vibration resounded throughout the Ganges Plain.

Beneath that Giant Bone Pillar that reached straight into the clouds, the black mud earth for several kilometers around suddenly exhibited a strange fluid-like collapse, as if it had lost its structural support.

Countless ruins, withered bones, and monster embryos that hadn't had time to take shape slid down into the center of the massive vortex.

It seemed to have become a funnel leading to the center of the earth.

Immediately after, a beam of energy so pitch black that even light could not escape surged upward from the center of the vortex, accompanied by a sound like the collective shriek of a million vengeful souls.

But this light beam did not attack anyone on the ground; it instantly exploded when it touched the Law Barrier at the top of the Mirror World's stratosphere.

It was like a balloon full of ink bursting at high altitude.

The black energy did not dissipate; instead, it condensed into tens of thousands of meteors burning with dark purple flames.

Under the dual influence of gravity and the will of the abyss, they traced parabolic arcs and shot toward all parts of the globe like a torrential rain.

The densest and thickest part of the meteor shower was aimed directly at Tokyo Bay.

...

Tokyo Bay, Frontline Headquarters of the Human Joint Expeditionary Force.

Ear-piercing alarms instantly tore through the originally somewhat orderly atmosphere in the command hall.

“High-energy reaction detected!”

A Russian Major in charge of radar monitoring suddenly shouted, “My God... what is that? Is it a missile?”

The image on the main screen instantly switched to a wide-area satellite map.

Densely packed red dots were seen sweeping over the originally dark map of Asia like a swarm of locusts.

According to the predicted trajectory provided by the ballistic computer in less than four seconds, the impact points of these things covered all land within fifty kilometers of the outer Tokyo Defense Circle.

This was carpet bombing.

And it was carpet bombing of an unknown yield.

“It's not missiles.”

Jiang Ming Mirror Image One, sitting in the position of Commander-in-Chief, looked up; his gaze was frighteningly calm, and the red and blue pencil he used to mark the map was snapped by him.

“That is troop deployment.”

Without him needing to explain further, all the officers present understood what this meant.

“Activate air defense interception procedures.”

“Run all Aegis Systems at full power. Use SM-3 and SM-6 missiles; no need to save ammunition. Tear this curtain of rain apart in the sky for me.”

“Whether those are rocks or monsters, I don't want them landing intact in my defense zone.”

With this command, the massive joint fleet anchored in Tokyo Bay instantly came to life.

The US USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, along with the Vertical Launch System covers of over a dozen Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, popped open simultaneously.

White smoke columns rose into the air from the sea as hundreds of anti-air missiles, trailing long plumes of fire, interwove into a web of fire and death to meet the falling black meteors head-on.

The first round of interception took place at an altitude of twenty thousand meters.

There were no earth-shattering explosions or flames.

When those expensive Kinetic Interceptor Warheads struck the black meteors, the latter did not disintegrate like rock or metal.

They burst.

But not into fragments; they turned into liquid.

Those massive black masses disintegrated in the air, turning into a viscous black rain splashing across the sky.

The shrapnel damage from the missiles had no effect on liquid; aside from making the rain fall in smaller, denser droplets, it had almost no hindering effect.

“Interception... ineffective.”

The monitor operator's voice carried a hint of trembling. “Targets are accelerating their descent; estimated impact in thirty seconds.”